Claude Snelling was a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia. He went to his daughter’s room in the night and confronted someone who had entered his home. He was shot and died. His daughter Beth Hupp survived and, forty-five years later, gave a statement at DeAngelo’s sentencing hearing. She was sixteen years old when her father was killed.
Brian and Katie Maggiore were twenty-one and twenty years old when they were shot while walking their dog in Rancho Cordova on an evening in February 1978. They were young enough to have been beginning their adult lives together.
The Southern California murder victims — Robert Offerman and Debra Manning, Charlene and Lyman Smith, Keith and Patrice Harrington, Manuela Witthuhn, Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez, Janelle Cruz — were killed in their homes in the late 1970s and 1980s in crimes that their communities and families struggled to understand and that went unresolved for decades.
Among the survivors of sexual assault, the experiences described publicly convey the long-term effects of the crimes. Jane Carson-Sandler, who was attacked in 1976, described living what she called an “effective life sentence” — ongoing effects that changed the way she moved through the world, triggering associations with the night of the attack, lasting decades after it. She said, in remarks prepared for the sentencing hearing, that wounds “heal and our scars remain.”
Kris Pedretti was fifteen when she was attacked in 1976. She described losing the person she had been — the cheerful girl she identified with — along with friendships, faith, and a sense of continuity with the person she might have become. She switched schools three times, experienced two failed marriages, and turned to self-medication before seeking therapy. She found therapy only after DeAngelo’s arrest, more than four decades after the attack. She is now married and runs a support group for sexual assault survivors. Her statement at the sentencing hearing included the message: “He didn’t win, I’m not a lost girl.”